Subject: Exchanges - Ticker Tape Terminology

Every stock traded on the world's stock exchanges is identified by a
short symbol. For example, the symbol for AT&T is just T. These
symbols date from the days when stock trades were reported on a ticker
tape. Ticker symbols are still used today as brief, unambiguous
identifiers for stocks. Similar abbreviations are used for stock
options and many other securities.

Ticker symbols get reused on different exchanges, so you'll sometimes
see a qualification ahead of the ticker symbol. For example, the
symbol "C:A" refers to a company traded on one of the Canadian
exchanges (Toronto, to be exact) with the symbol A. The stock quote
services on the web usually understand this notation. It's probably
no surprise that the North American-centric services pretty much
assume that anything unqualified is traded on a U.S. exchange; I've
found that they do not accept something like "NYSE:T" even though they
perhaps should.

A few stock ticker symbols include a suffix, which seems to
differentiate among a company's various classes of common stock.

Somem of the quote services allow you to enter the ticker and suffix
all run together, while others require you to enter a dot between the
ticker and the suffix. For an example, try AKO, classes A and B.

Now that you understand a bit about the ticker symbol, there's some
more explanation required to understand what appears on the "ticker
tape" such as those shown on CNN or CNBC.

The extra zeroes for the big trades are to make them stand out. All
trades on CNN and CNBC are delayed by 15 minutes. CNBC once advertised
a "ticker guide pamphlet, free for the asking", back when they merged
with FNN. It also has explanations for the futures they show. NBC
Cable offers a brief guide to the ticker contents:
http://www.nbccableinfo.com/insidenbccable/networks/cnbc/prog/tickerguide.html

However, the first translation is not necessarily correct. CNBC has
a dynamic maximum size for transactions that are displayed this way.
Depending on how busy things are at any particular time, the maximum
varies from 100 to 5000 shares. You can figure out the current maximum
by watching carefully for about five minutes. If the smallest number
of shares you see in the second format is "10s" for any traded security,
then the first form can mean anything from 100 to 900 shares. If the
smallest you see is "50s" (which is pretty common), the first form
means anything between 100 and 4900 shares.

Note that at busy times, a broker's ticker drops the volume figure and
then everything but the last dollar digit (e.g. on a busy day, a trade
of 25,000 IBM at 68 3/4 shows only as "IBM 8 3/4" on a broker's ticker).
That never happens on CNBC, so I don't know how they can keep up with all
trades without "forgetting" a few.

NASDAQ uses a "fifth letter" identifier in its ticker symbols. Four
letter symbols, and five letter symbols in instances of multiple
issues listed by the same company, are listed in newspapers and
carried on the ticker screen by CNBC and CNN. These symbols are
required to retrieve quotes from quote servers.

Here's the complete list of the NASDAQ fifth-letter identifiers with
brief descriptions: